Story-a-day
Hello dear readers!
I hope you’re all doing well. Today I want to talk to you about something Dustin, Phil, and I have been working on to help foster some creativity and hone our brainstorming skills. I feel like I’ve been really struggling to come up with good hooks or storylines, so Dust and Phil recommended this to help me practice crafting a good hook.
For the last month or so, during the weekdays we’ve been posting extremely short prompts for stories. This is super similar to the Log Line recommendations from “Save the Cat!”/”Save the Cat! Writes a Novel”. We are trying to pitch our story ideas to each other in as few sentences as possible. Ideally these should be one sentence, but sometimes we run up to three or four. (We can do that because we’re making up the rules for our little exercise, hehe.)
Dustin gave me this advice to help keep me on track:
You have to look for the conflict.
Who is the protagonist?
What do they want?
What stops them from getting it?
What are the stakes?
What do they risk to succeed?
Those five questions can fix most scenes and most stories.
There are a couple things I really like about this exercise.
It forces me to take time to be creative every day. Consistency is King. Doing something creative and practicing your writing every day, even if just for a few minutes, will yield great cumulative results.
It helps me come to terms with the fact that not every idea is a winner. Some ideas are going to be great, some will be garbage. Having to produce ideas every day makes it easy to just sort of shrug and move on if I come up with one that isn’t so great. It’s all part of the creative process. It makes it easier to discard what is bad and helps hone what is good.
It allows me to try new ideas and work outside my comfort zone. There is zero risk involved in sharing ideas with Dustin and Phil, because we have a great rapport and I know they won’t judge or make fun of me, even when my ideas aren’t great. Because we’ve created that safe space, I can try out a lot more ideas that I might not normally feel comfortable enough to try. I love my fantasy genre, but what if I want to try out paranormal fiction, or rom com? This is like a gigantic playground where I can try anything and everything I want. It’s been fun and challenging.
I’m building a stock-pile of stories to write. This can kind of be a double edged sword, but it’s nice to know there is no end to the stories I can tell. So many books to write, so little time.
Creativity is like a muscle. The more that we use it, the stronger it gets. This has been a really fun exercise. I recommend it.
Here are some examples:
Paper Animals - Sam is afraid of everything. Picked on and isolated because of her crippling anxiety she takes up origami and makes an amazing menagerie of paper animals. One night she dreams of taking the animals on an epic adventure to help them become real. Unable to wake, she is beset by scissor monsters, fire beasts, and a treacherous dream landscape, Sam must overcome her fears to help the only friends she's ever known to become real or stay lost forever in her nightmares. (Tiff)
Driftwood - Bibs is a scout of the Anruas, a small, innocent frog-like folk who live under the great irontrees. During a storm a canoe of kids - including Bibs’ little sister - is washed out to sea, and brave Bibs goes after them. After a dangerous voyage on driftwood he finds the kids washed up on a strange shore peopled by giants and faeries. Can Bibs keep the kids safe, and find a way to ride the driftwood home? (Dustin)
Cyberstalker - a tech-phobic detective and an FBI agent on the Cybercrime division investigate a series of seemingly random murders, but all are apparently motivated by a company’s new AI tool beta which is using mentally unstable people to kill anyone opposed to the tool’s upcoming release launch. (Phil)
You can see how Phil and Dustin are much more concise and succinct than I am. I still have a lot of practice and repetitions to go, but each time I come up with a new story, I’m working towards getting better and better. You can also see how most of the elements Dustin talked about are in each pitch: A protagonist who wants something, the thing stopping them from getting it, and what’s at stake with the risks they have to take to succeed.
Do you have any exercises you like to do to help practice brainstorming and creativity? I’d love to hear about them! Leave me comment below!
Till next time dear reader, go flex those creative muscles! <3 Tiff
